Warren native talks about enduring Moore, Oklahoma, tornado

As storm clouds gathered in the west Monday afternoon, Rebekah Lara — a Warren, Mich., native living in Moore, Okla. — drove to Briarwood Elementary School, picked up her child and hurried to a friend’s storm shelter.

“We had 11 kids and two adults, it was standing room only,” said Lara, 34, who now lives in Oklahoma because of her husband’s work.

She never looked at the big twister headed their way.

But she heard it.“It sounded like an airplane landing on top of us.”

Monday’s EF4 tornado killed at least 24 people, destroying neighborhoods with winds up to 200 miles an hour.

Lara — who has lived in Oklahoma with her husband and three children, Christian, 14, Mackenzie, 13, and Gabrielle, 11, since 2011 — said storm warnings had been issued prior to the storm.

“They were telling us between 2 and 3 p.m.,” she said.

When she dropped her daughter off in the morning, she told her to expect an early pickup.

“I got the kids at 2:30 p.m. and the school stopped releasing them at 2:40 p.m.,” she said.

“I was scared out of my mind. I was just trying to get to the shelter as fast as I could.”

Lara had learned prior to the storm where a shelter might be.

“It’s very, very rare to have a basement here,” she said.

After waiting out the storm for 90 minutes, Lara and the others emerged to a changed landscape.

“The houses across the street are leveled,” she said.

The Lara home has a “shifted roof,” lifted off and dropped back down.

“Our entire house has debris everywhere,” she said. “There’s gook, dirt and water and leaves and glass everywhere. All the windows are blown out.”

The tornado removed doors from frames. One door is standing in a hallway. A strange dog was in the family bathtub when the Laras arrived home.

Walls are cracked. The insides of the washing machine and kitchen stove top lie crumpled in the yard. The storm wound power lines into a tight coil.

The house has no water or electricity so the Laras are staying with Rebekah’s mother in Oklahoma City.

“I didn’t sleep,” Lara said.The Briarwood school is gone, a block from their home on 118th Street.

Lara said she has never been in a tornado.

“And I never will again,” she said. “We’re talking about going back to Michigan. If you could just see the devastation, you would never want to experience that again.”